Self-care is a really popular idea at least recently or maybe it's been popular for a while and I've only just now been exposed to it. But self-care really comes down to taking care of oneself doing the things that are important to you that make you happy that give you some feeling of contentment or even purpose.
And I think self-care can come in a variety of different forms, it can be hobbies, it can be sports or just leisure activities that you do just for the sake of enjoyment or pleasure. But I think the the recent kind of look at or the recent fixation with self-care is really come down to ways of coping with stress in your life.
So self-care then becomes the kind of antidote for dealing and coping with stress. So it's important for us to reflect on and think about how we identify the our need for self-care, what are the triggers that we can have we can observe in our daily life that showed that we need to exercise.
Care. For me, it's always kind of a reaction or interaction. I have with other people when I start to realize that I need to take some time for myself either. I'll be impatient or just there'll be some misunderstandings that kind of emerged for no reason other than my kind of confusion or it'll just be a matter of feeling overwhelmed or feeling kind of like you're not able to deal with whatever the situations are that you're having to deal with.
So that for me is kind of my trigger for knowing that self-care needs to be a priority. I need to put this into practice and please don't get me wrong here. I have I'm not a master of self-care. I'm actually woefully terrible at the exercising self-care but I'm getting better and I'm trying to find ways every day of putting my need for self-care and to practice and even just identifying little shortcuts in order to feel a little bit more whole before.
I kind of re-enter the fray of daily life. One of the things That I find really important when trying to exercise self-care is having a way of dealing with feelings of guilt. So there's always this sense or I always have the sense of well. I'm exercising self-care what am I taking away?
So now I can't work as much or maybe I can't do the thing other things in my life that are also important. I can't fulfill other responsibilities in my life dealing with that feeling of guilt is really important otherwise any self-care activities you engage with are really gonna be futile, they're gonna be worthless.
Because when you're trying to enjoy yourself, if you've got if you're harboring feelings of guilt, it can become really really kind of counterproductive to even bother trying to exercise any feelings of or any self-care activities. So in order to kind of avoid those guilty feelings I tried to just reserve judgment.
I would try to reserve myself judgment because what guilt really comes down to is just you're judging yourself for choosing to give yourself the care that you need over and kind of taking care of your or doing fulfilling your responsibilities. And I don't think people should necessarily feel guilty about that.
I think you should that comes about because of that those feelings of self-judgment or those ideas thoughts of self-judgment. So if we can reserve those thoughts engage in self. -care practices and an after we finished caring for ourselves, we'll probably it's what I usually find is that the activity the responsibilities that I need to fulfill either weren't as critical as I thought they were or I'm able to fulfill those responsibilities in a much more efficient way.
So self-care becomes kind of a life hack for working more productively. I and I I want to caution or I want to at least point out that self-care doesn't have to take hours and hours and hours out of your life. I often exercise self-care in a matter of five ten fifteen minutes.
If I have a meeting that ends earlier or another meeting that is is delayed or cancelled I take care of myself in that time.
